NASA to Announce New Discoveries About Alien Planets

reply to post by Wildeagle


dont worry dude, "NASA to Announce New Discoveries About Alien Planets" isnt a sensational title, and your content is all good.

Im with ya. Anything the worlds more advanced known space agency has to say is worth listening to, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

Some people expect a gripping conspiracy when they open threads, and dont appreciate simple science

"alien" only means little green aliens to those expecting to find proof of aliens in a thread. For the rest of us, the literal meaning will do just fine

Another announcement? I'm glad and interested but FFS, why does everyone keep thinking it's about alien planets? If NASA was to announce such a thing, I assure you, it'd be getting much more attention and you'd notice a lot more news coverage on the announcement itself.

reply to post by cluckerspud


It's not sensationalist, it's eye-catching. Sensationalist implies you were misled by the title. Eye-catching means they used wording that would make you more apt to check out the article. Any critical thinking person, after a "quick read", would realize the title is simply speaking about planets outside our solar system.

I, too, like these NASA announcements. I agree with others that they are letting out tiny bits of information little by little. Every time they do one of these press conferences, it is just one more piece to the disclosure-pie, IMO. Just one more step to realizing that we aren't alone. I can wait...I just hope I am still alive when the "great discovery" happens.

NASA's last few announcements have been super played up and a huge letdown. They a playing everyone to keep their funding.

Anyway this is an interesting topic. I am wondering why they spend so much time looking for planets in the habitable zone? It's not like they are ever going to send a probe or anything over there to verify. Unless it's news worthy 200 years later. The best they will ever do there is verify that it could possibly hold life but we'll never know in our lifetime.

To me this is a waste of research money they should be spending on developing a new propulsion system which actually COULD go and see what is there instead of guessing. Pointless.

press conference on now

www.nasa.gov...

NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Extraordinary New Planetary System

www.nasa.gov...

Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

edit on 2-2-2011 by conar because: (no reason given)

Boring news is boring.

Well here is the result!

NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Extraordinary New Planetary System

Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

"The Kepler-11 planetary system is amazing," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and a Kepler science team member at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "It’s amazingly compact, it’s amazingly flat, there’s an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star - we didn’t know such systems could even exist."

There is a whole lot more to read on this here. www.nasa.gov...

I would like to also link you to another thread that a member graciously posted, on educating us about exoplanets. www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by SPACEYstranger
reply to post by Wildeagle

 

dont worry dude, "NASA to Announce New Discoveries About Alien Planets" isnt a sensational title, and your content is all good.

Im with ya. Anything the worlds more advanced known space agency has to say is worth listening to, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

Some people expect a gripping conspiracy when they open threads, and dont appreciate simple science

"alien" only means little green aliens to those expecting to find proof of aliens in a thread. For the rest of us, the literal meaning will do just fine

edit on 2-2-2011 by SPACEYstranger because: (no reason given)

Thankyou so much for your lovely post! And I can't agree more.

Nothing that is newly discovered is really small surely, but rather an advancement!

I appreciate your post.

Here is another link regarding the discoveries. www.chron.com...

Until now, only two planets outside our solar system were even thought to be in the "Goldilocks zone." And both those discoveries are highly disputed.
Fifty-four possibilities is "an enormous amount, an inconceivable amount," Borucki said. "It's amazing to see this huge number because up to now, we've had zero."

reply to post by Spirit Warrior 11:11

I am wondering why they spend so much time looking for planets in the habitable zone? It's not like they are ever going to send a probe or anything over there to verify.

the holy grail of exoplanet science is to find another earth. Kepler will deliver to the scientific community the frequency (how common) earth size planets in earth-like orbits are. The sample size is so good they will extrapolate keplers results throughout the whole galaxy. Thats interesting enough we can then speculate on how many will have life or even intelligent life. We will have solid numbers to work with.

these statistics will tell us how many earth size planets in the HZ we should expect to find nearby earth. We can then base future missions on these statistics. Lets say keplers result is 1 in 10 stars have an earth size planet in the HZ. We then know that if we can search 100 stars nearby we should be able to find 10 but if the results are 1 in 10,000 we need a much better future telescope mission to find and study any.

in addition kepler will tell us additional info like what stars are best for planets. We think there will be a corrolation between the composition of a star and how many planets it has. Just now people try to link metalicity of the star with planets, a more recent theory is stars that are lithium deficient like our sun will have planets. kepler will be able to confirm or falsify these theories maybe give is some new ones. So we could get to a stage of targeting stars by their properties which helps design future missions and gives us good info on where to point the future telescope

reply to post by Wildeagle

Great find. Mix this news of finding a "habitable zoned" planet with two other pieces revealed by NASA. First, lightning storms produce antimatter. Second, based on ideas generated by a German scientist (probably here via PROJECT/OPERATION PAPERCLIP) 50 years ago, we could have electro-magnetic dimensional drives that would allow us to travel to planets in our solar system within hours and to other stars within DAYS. Hmmmm...

At the very least, it's exciting to think about the possibilities...

Tuned in late...just catching the tail end of the conference

Seems there are 5 discovered earth sized planets in the habitable zone...they are investigating those 5 now.

the stars are smaller though, so stands to reason that things on said planets are a bit colder

Edit: they just mentioned 1238 candidates...not sure what the 5 were singled out for...still 4 months of working and 1238 possible earths in our general neighborhood..our eyes are just starting to crack open and we are seeing alot of potentials...wild.

I wonder how this fits into drakes equasion.

Seems like they're finding planets and star systems in bunches. Only a matter of time before we find what we're looking for.

Go Kepler!

(ok that was lame)

very interesting conference.. but will all these planets being discovered we are back to Fermi Paradox.

I don't really like NASA's strategy:

"Another Earth discovered!!!" *click link* "It's a ball of stone millions of light years away and hot as hell." Funding comes in.

Then the alien castles and stuff they blurr out from pics or leave completely unpublished.

reply to post by SaturnFX


The 5 singled out were Earth size and Super Earth planet candidates in the habitable zone. There were a remaining 49 Gas Giant planet's in this habitable zone as well, each with the possibility of many moons capable of supporting life. All candidates though if i heard correctly in the conference.

The 1200 candidates found in 4 months is incredibly good, especially considering our technology still has a way's to go before being able to detect the very small planets easily and reliably as they often will go unnoticed in the star's noise. We can expect however though that the number of candidates in the future won't be as large, but we will find better quality planets, earth like planets around sun like stars that would take a much longer time scale (around 3 years) to confirm.

The next generation of direct imaging telescopes is going to be extremely exciting in my opinion.


Ill quote what i wrote in my own thread about the general topic of exoplanets

Originally posted by Stuffed


Alright watched the press conference and it was certainly interesting so I'll post up some of the numbers they revealed and some of my opinions on it and then i will try and get a more in depth tutorial for the Planethunters classification done later tonight.

The total Kepler Candidates goes from 700+ to 1200+ rather than a new 1000 added onto the 700.
The breakdown of these candidates is as follows:

155453 Stars 1235 candidates
68 Earth size
288 Super Earth
662 Neptune
165 Jupiter
54 Habitable Zone planets

Now reading this there are probably two groups that stand out at you. 68 Earth Size, and 54 Habitable Zone Planets. Of the Habitable zone planets 1 is below Earth Size, 4 are Super Earth, and the remaining 49 are Neptune to Jupiter Sized planets. As we know from our own solar system the Jupiter, Gas Giant planets have a tendency to have quite a few moons. So 49 jovian planets each most likely with many moons exist in the habitable zone of their star, a pretty significant number although these are still planetary candidates.

The second most interesting thing talked about in the conference was the Kepler 11 System. The Kepler 11 system is the most heavily populated (in terms of planets) system found thus far located about 2,000 Light Years from Earth. With 6 CONFIRMED planets. Five of the Six planets are all very close and compact in an orbit around their star, with all 5 of them being able to fit within the distance between our Sun and Mercury. The planetary sizes of the planets in Kepler 11 range from 1.87 Earth Radius' to 3.88 Earth Radius'. Now, because we have so many planets in the system scientists are able to look at the data and extrapolate mass much better due to the gravitational tugging between the planets. Because of this, they have concluded that because they are bigger planets with lower masses that they are not super earths, but still this is an incredibly interesting stellar system.

What we can expect for the future with Kepler is that more candidates will be found by the Planethunters team yes, but overall the number of candidates found will slow down over time. This is to be expected because we have already discovered the larger, closer in stars that are much easier to spot. So the quantity of candidates will slow down, but the quality of the candidates will increase and that's when things will get extremely interesting. The habitable zone planet's we have found thus far are all around stars smaller than our own sun and much cooler, so in turn the star's habitable zone is much closer in and the orbital periods' of its' planets are shorter (can be detected easier). The future holds the possibility of confirmations of Earth like planets around stars much like our own with Year (earth time) long orbits, requiring around a minimum of three years to confirm. Patience is key here, the next few years are going to be a very important milestone for the understanding of our Galaxy.

I didn't catch the total number of confirmed planets in this batch of data but when i find it i will post up the new numbers and hope a mod could edit the OP to reflect them.

Edit: Guess there were only 6 confirmed planets, all the planets in the Kepler 11 system, bringing the total confirmed Kepler scope planets to 15 and the grand total up to 525.

reply to post by martinkb


early days , still dont know how common earth size planets in the hz of G type stars are. Then we have to find out how many have a biosphere like earth, They might all just be like venus.

Well i suppose we will try to make a conspiracy out of anything but look, NASA are rubbish.

Everytime i go there website i imagine there is thousands of photo's of planets, galaxys, our moon and lots of juicy information...However i just end up getting fustrated by the lack of it.

Originally posted by Wildeagle
I tend to get pretty excited about NASA announcements, here's hoping they might have something cool to tell us! Keep your eyes peeled for what they have to say, tomorrow!

I know the feeling.

If you want to know what NASA has to reveal, before their official announcement, they tell everyone ahead of time on Space.com. Lol...

NASA's Announcement...
Astronomers Find 6-Pack of Planets in Alien Solar System

Oh BOY!
Alien craft pull all kinds of amazing stunt and no doubt traveled (at least distance, perhaps not time) many light years to get here. We have AT LEAST recovered one downed UFO. I cant wait til they tell me about a small planet thats only -250 below zero and may have water and liquid nitrogen atmosphere. Whatever. (this in NO WAY is a remark about OP!)